The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (24 page)

Due to their close association from the task force, Harold Brown and Bud Farmer worked together on numerous occasions, including an August 1979 bust of a DC-3 that landed at an isolated western Kentucky airport with 2,500 pounds of Colombian marijuana on board, valued at more than $1 million, or $3.12 million in 2011 dollars. They arrested seven men at the airfield, and at the time Brown said that as many as a dozen more could be arrested by the end of the investigation.

After the agents loaded the ton and a quarter of confiscated Colombian pot onto the back of a truck to transport it to an evidence facility, a staff photographer snapped a shot of the task force: Bud Farmer, a tall, middle-aged man in white pants, a short-sleeved collared shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses whose wire rims disappear underneath the graying temples of his hair; behind Farmer stands a Jefferson County policeman under Farmer's command; Harold Brown sits on the bed of the truck, one leg crossed over the other knee, wearing blue jeans, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses, shaggy dark hair, sideburns and a broad mustache; behind Brown, a sergeant for the DEA sits on a bale of confiscated marijuana. Brown looks away in the photograph, toward the unseen distance, while Bud Farmer stares directly at Brown, seeming to eye him more as a suspect than as a fellow law enforcement officer.

By 1979, cops throughout Kentucky distrusted Harold Brown. Investigations seemed to unravel when he became involved, and he associated with a wild element of Lexington nightlife, including cowboy narcotics cop and drug trafficker Andrew Thornton, who came from a blue-blooded horse-breeding family with experience fighting in the Caribbean as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Thornton joined the Lexington police after his military service in 1968 and worked his way through the ranks of patrol, narcotics, detective and criminal intelligence before resigning from the force in 1977 after getting his law degree.

"All I can tell you is that we had a very strong suspicion at the time that Harold Brown and Andrew Thornton ... were all in a group," recalled retired Detective Don Powers. "And [Brown] was just as much a part of it as the rest of them.... When they had those DC-3s gutted out, they were hauling planeloads of marijuana in them....

"There was even-and I wish I could remember more about this-but there was even strong suspicion that they were taking guns to South America and trading them for drugs. But as far as I know, no one ever proved that....

"There was just so much raw intelligence during this time that Thornton was really working for the CIA.... There was just all kinds of rumors floating around, and as far as I know, none of that was ever really substantiated....

"I can tell you with some assurance that no law enforcement wanted anything to do with Harold Brown during this time, because of the suspicion that Thornton would hear about it....

"There always was the thought-you know-whether there was really suspicion of this, or whether Thornton and his associates wanted to make people to believe it, but there was always suspicion and talk that somehow they were connected to the CIA."

Frustrated, Louisville narcotics Detective Bud Farmer alerted DEA Internal Affairs that its chief agent in Kentucky was corrupt. Detective Don Powers with the Kentucky State Police came to the same conclusion.

After he was tossed out of the DEA in late 1981, Harold Brown continued to operate in his secretive capacity with his trafficking partner, Andrew Thornton. On the side, Brown established a mad scientist's laboratory, selling deadly poisons like ricin (made from castor beans) and curare (a rare South American blowgun toxin) in the classified section of Soldier ofFortune magazine. A teenager in Florida who wanted to kill his parents found Brown's ad and sent a friend to Louisville to pick up the poison he ordered.

Brown sold ricin to the kid's friend, but the friend had a change of heart and turned the ricin over to the police. Cops in Florida were about to discover that the maker of the poison in Louisville had a very shady past, but before they could turn the heat up on Harold Brown and get to the bottom of his involvement in ricin distribution, Brown turned up dead on March 20, 1984, shot in the head by the .32-caliber blue-steel Llama automatic pistol found in his hand.

From the police report:

"The victim was known by the undersigned as the former head of the local federal Drug Enforcement Administration.... A contact gunshot entrance wound was noted on the right side of the victim's head approximately two inches above the ear and near the mid-line of the ear.... There was a large amount of blood underneath the victim's head. Blood was also noted on his face, upper body, right leg near the gun and on the pillow by the right hand."

Although initial reports indicated suicide, Andrew Thornton thought otherwise. He contacted the police, wanting answers, as the Louisville homicide detective reported seven days after Brown's death:

"Thornton thinks it is a murder. Thornton said Brown was killed with a.32-caliber automatic and that Harold Brown never owned a.32-caliber automatic."

The investigating officer called the Thornton family horse farm, Thrive Main Stud, near Paris, Kentucky, and got a pager number for Andrew, which he called.

"At 0955 hours, Andrew Thornton called me on the telephone. I explained to Andrew that we were investigating the death of Harold Brown and that I understood he was a friend of Harold Brown's. Mr. Thornton interrupted and said, `His best friend.' I asked Mr. Thornton if or when he would be in Louisville, that we would like to talk with him about Harold Brown. Mr. Thornton asked me if I was with the `Special Investigations' or `Homicide.' I advised him that I only worked Homicide and Robbery. His reply was `OK, I will talk with you,' Mr. Thornton advised that he would be at Sport Shooters in Louisville tonight at 1830 hours ... and our conversation was terminated."

Later that day, when police arrived at the shooting range, Andrew Thornton was not there, and in his place was Harold Brown's attorney, Fred Partin, who had also beat the police to Brown's apartment at the time of his death. Although Thornton claimed that Brown never owned a .32, Partin seemed to know its exact provenance.

"Partin ... stated that he believed it was a weapon that Brown had loaned him three or four years ago ... [which] had been stolen from [Partin's] home and had been reported to the Louisville Police Department. After he reported the weapon stolen, his wife received a call from a subject who stated that the weapon was in the back yard ... wrapped in plastic and it was returned to Brown. A check with L.P.D. records revealed Partin had reported a .32-caliber automatic stolen on November 18, 1979 ..."

Therefore, it was the word of Brown's "best friend," Andrew Thornton, against his attorney, Fred Partin, as to whether or not Brown owned a .32 automatic.

"I wasn't aware of that," Don Powers said decades later. "That's interesting ... I don't know. I just never in my own mind ever believed that Harold Brown shot himself, but I don't know what sort of pressure he was under at the time, what was about to happen that might have caused it. That case you were talking about, about that boy from Florida, maybe that was enough to tip the scales for him."

The police detectives and Andrew Thornton weren't the only ones skeptical of Brown's suicide. Even Fred Partin, Brown's attorney, raised his own concerns to the

"For one thing," Partin told the newspaper, "Brown had always said if he was going to kill himself, he would imitate his hero Ernest Hemingway and shoot himself in the mouth. Brown's fatal wound, though, was to the side of the head."

In June 1982, Andrew Thornton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana-smuggling conspiracy charge, paid a $5,000 fine and served six months in prison. On Wednesday, September 11, 1985, Thornton jumped from an airplane and fell to his death onto a gravel driveway outside Knoxville, Tennessee, after his parachute failed to open.

"Of course, when Thornton bailed out of the airplane he had cocaine strapped on him," Don Powers recalled, cocaine valued at $15 millionor $35.2 million in 2011 dollars. "Supposedly, the CIA had some kind of special phone number, and it was found on Thornton."

From the report:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.-Andrew Carter Thornton II apparently set a twin-engine plane on auto pilot over Knoxville before parachuting to his death early Wednesday morning with about 75 pounds of cocaine, authorities said yesterday.

I•.1

Thornton, a pilot and holder of an eighth-degree black belt in [Wing-Chun, Bruce Lee's fighting style], was carrying several papers in a coat pocket, including his passport and verses citing the virtues O fa mercenary lifestyle.

He also was wearing a bulletproof vest and was carrying two pistols, a stiletto, special goggles for seeing at night ... about $4,500 in cash, six gold krugerrands and identcation papers in at least two names.

"He almost made the landing," [Lieutenant Charles] Coleman said.... "He landed on the cocaine, broke his ribs and stretched his aorta to the breaking point. "

And thus, this strange chapter of the history of drugs in the Bluegrass State ended with no real resolution. Two men who officially were responsible for stopping men like Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker appeared to be engaged in bigger drug deals than anything attempted by Marion County folk, and yet these same men were the Kentucky faces of the federal War on Drugs.

To Johnny Boone, it was clear that secret agents inside the government got away with bigger scores than he could ever imagine; and to the police detectives watching from the sidelines, it seemed clear to them that while they spent their time chasing men like Johnny Boone, the really big fish made mockeries of them.

"You're absolutely right," Don Powers recalled. "There's two things we'll never know out of all this: whether there was some involvement with the CIA and whether they were giving the green light to haul weapons south .. . and drugs north."

Johnny Boone and Don Powers, outlaw and detective, were not the only two who suspected the corruption of DEA Agent Harold Brown. The two-time former US attorney in Louisville, Marion County native John L. "Jack" Smith, saw it with open eyes as well.

Smith possessed ironclad law enforcement credentials: His father, Henry Smith, was the Marion County judge executive and raised three sons. One became an FBI agent, one became a Secret Service agent, and Jack, a precocious federal prosecutor, became the US attorney for the Western District of Kentucky in Louisville in January 1969-only five years after passing the bar. In November 1970, Jack Smith moved to New Orleans to lead the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force for a year and a half.

In New Orleans, Smith worked to uncover public corruption, starting with Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, best known for his portrayal by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which tells the story of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw for Shaw's connection to an alleged conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. But Jack Smith's task force was not interested in grand conspiracies. Rather, the task force looked into a much simpler sort of crime: payoffs to government officials by, in this case, people from "pinball machines ... Bally Manufacturing," Smith said.